I bought a padded journal with a brass lock. Mostly, I wrote about the neighbor, transporting myself into the bodies of his lovers. I knew of sex only in terms of the rudimentary and biological, which, prior to this, I’d expressed as the kind of ethereal nonsense girls are prone to projecting onto the unknown. But, as witness to the brute force of the act—the vibrating plaster, the elongating cracks, the porcelain kissing in the kitchen cabinets—I felt my first urge to record-keep. I fantasized about scaling up to his window, hooking my chin over his windowsill to see whether he kept his prosthetic legs on or set them beside the bed.  

The year my sister and I both got pregnant, and consequently married, we divided the porcelain. I took the peacock plate, she took the gravy boat shaped like a liver.

“I figured you’d want the liver-boat,” she said, scratching her razor-burnt scalp. “So I’m taking it.”

“Go ahead,” I told her. “I’m a little past the digestive sculpture.”

“The liver is not the digestive system,” she said. “Anyway, you never get past anything.”

My husband got a job at a bio-hazardous waste facility several bus routes outside the city. Most of the day, he welded faulty sections of the track that carried the waste into the incinerator. When he got home, he’d talk about the debris. He’d tally up the pen needles, the lancets that had poked through plastic bags of god knows what. Then he’d dream of their steel tips, lodged in his mouth. He’d wake in a sweat, spend the rest of the night before the bathroom mirror, inverting his lower lip, shining a flashlight into the crevices.

“Fiberglass,” he’d grumble. “Asbestos.”

“As soon as I squeeze this porker out, you can quit,” I told him. “Just let me see what motherhood is like.”

It was a twelve pound boy. At eight weeks, he had amassed forty rings of fat about his thighs, neck, arms and wrists. His bulbous appearance made it impossible not to view him as a jiggling loaf of gluten.